Thursday, January 30, 2014

Starting in the summer of 2013 disturbing stories began
emerging from Iraq of both armed groups and regular citizens forcing people out
of their homes due to their sect or ethnicity. This occurred in Diyala, Ninewa,
and Babil where the Islamic State of Iraq and other insurgent groups were
likely responsible. There were also reports of refugees from Dhi Qar and Basra
as well where angry citizens forced people out because they were blamed for
violence, or being scapegoated for the actions of militants in the rest of the
country. It now appears that this trend actually started a bit earlier in the
year and affected up to 1,000 families. This is another sign of the
deteriorating situation in Iraq.

The NGO Coordinating Committee in Iraq recently issued
a letter warning of the increasing number of internal refugees. While most
of the letter was about the humanitarian situation in Anbar it mentioned that
from April to December 2013 more than 1,000 families, roughly 5,000 people had
been forced from their homes in Baghdad, Diyala, Ninewa, and Basra. Those were
exactly the areas where the press
reported displacement as well. In Diyala for example, the Shammar tribe
fled Baquba after receiving threats from gunmen, while intimidation by the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) led to more than 300 families, mostly Kurds
and Turkmen, leaving their homes from October to December. In Ninewa, Shabaks
were targeted in September leading to a number of them fleeing Mosul. Finally
in Basra, Sunni officials, professionals, and religious men were threatened and
killed in retaliation for terrorist attacks in the rest of the country. That
led the Sunni Endowment to shut down its mosques in the province for a short
while partly to protest the situation, and partly out of security concerns. There
were news stories of Sunnis leaving the governorate afterward. The forced
displacement of Iraqis was a trademark of the civil war years in Iraq from
2006-2008. Armed factions sought to push out rival groups, which had a
devastating affect on not only Baghdad but many surrounding provinces as well.
One tactic that ISIS is trying to follow once again is increasing sectarian
tensions by attacking the Shiite population. This usually takes the form of car
bombs, but now has expanded into threatening people out of their homes as well.
Kurds and Turkmen have been included in this campaign because they are not
Arabs, and therefore do not have a place in the organization’s vision of an
Arab Muslim society. Just as worrisome were the stories coming out of Basra,
because that appeared to be the work of angry tribes and regular people who
were frustrated by the never ending attacks by ISIS and others.

The security situation in Iraq is taking a turn for the
worse. The new wave of refugees is just the latest sign. The displacement in
Baghdad, Diyala, Ninewa, and Basra are being met by a new wave from Anbar. With
the government proving largely incapable of dealing with the insurgency it is unknown
when and if any of these people will be able to return to their homes. The
stories of their displacement is also raising tensions in the country, and
increasing fears of what direction the country is taking.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

One of the major side affects of the on going fighting in Iraq’s
Anbar is the huge displacement of people. Iraq still has over 1 million
internal refugees from the civil war years. Now several thousand more have been
added to that number. Government shelling usually gets mentioned in the press
as the main cause of this current exodus, but there are other factors as well.
More importantly there is the question of what’s in the future for these
people. Will they be able to eventually return to their homes or will the lack
of security preclude that for the foreseeable future? Anbar may be leading Iraq
into a new phase in its long-standing refugee problem.

The numbers for the amount of people that have fled Anbar has
steadily increased since fighting started in the province at the very end of
December 2013. Some of the earliest figures emerged in the first week of
January. January
5, 2014 Buratha News reported that 400 families had fled Fallujah
due to the violence. That
same day a member of the provincial council told Al-Mada that 3,000
people had been displaced from Fallujah and the neighboring town of Amiryat
Fallujah. January
8, the United Nations said that 5,000 families had left Anbar for
Karbala, Salahaddin, Baghdad and elsewhere, while the Ministry of Displacement
and Migration and NGOs had the number as high as 9,000
families. That would be roughly 25,000-45,000 people. The International
Organization for Migration noted that there were up to 13,000 people in
Kurdistan alone. January
9, the Iraqi Red Crescent claimed that 13,000 families had been
displaced, which was quite a jump from previous estimates. January 16,
the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) put that number at 70,000
individuals, doubling some of the previous figures from just eight days before.
By January
24 the United Nations had 140,000 displaced with 65,000 in just
the previous week. Finally, on January
27 the Red Crescent was quoted as saying over 34,000 families had
fled since the beginning of the conflict. These people have not just come from
Fallujah and Ramadi, but Khalidiya,
Jazeera, Husayba al-Sharqiya, Albu Bali, and other towns. Given the
fluid situation in Anbar right now it is probably impossible to determine the
actual number of internal refugees. Different groups have come up with varying
figures, but they have all consistently gone up. This might have missed the
changing nature of the conflict however. On January
9 and 10 for
instance there were several news stories that hundreds of families had returned
to Fallujah during a lull in the fighting. A member of the provincial council
gave the amount as around 2,000
families. Whatever the exact amount and the ebb and flow of the movement
there is definitely a massive migration going on in Anbar.

The causes of this great movement are many. The Iraqi military has
been using both targeted and indiscriminate artillery and mortar fire on
several cities and towns in Anbar since the fighting started. This is constantly
mentioned in news reports as the major cause for people fleeing. There
appear to be many other reasons as well, but they have only been mentioned in
passing. January
4 Agence France Presse talked to some Fallujans who said they were leaving
to escape what they expected to be a major battle between insurgents and the
security forces. Many services and shops have been shut down as well in cities
like Ramadi and Fallujah making it difficult to stay there. One displaced boy told Radio Free Iraq that gunmen
had seized his home. Finally, AIN reported that mosques in the Askari and
Shuhada neighborhoods of eastern Fallujah were urging
people to leave their homes over their loudspeakers to avoid an impending
military crackdown on the city. Shelling alone cannot explain the massive
dislocation that is on going. The government has fired onto several cities, but
they usually target the same neighborhoods each time. A combination of a lack
of food, electricity and fuel, fighting between the insurgents and tribes and
the security forces, fears that the Iraqi army may launch an assault on
Fallujah, along with the artillery and mortars are a more likely explanation
for the continued displacement.

Aid agencies have warned that Iraq is going through the greatest
refugee crisis since the civil war years. Thousands of people have left their
homes in Anbar because of the fighting. The issue at hand is where will these
people go. In early January some were making a return to their homes when it
appeared that the situation had calmed down, but it didn’t and more left
afterward. Will a level of stability return to Anbar so that people can go back
permanently or will there be continued fighting in the governorate that will
keep families away for the long term? If it is the latter then this is another
sign that Iraq is deteriorating. Over one million people have never returned to
their place of origin since 2006. Several thousand could be added to that
amount if the problems in Anbar aren’t resolved.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Today Iraq’s Anbar province is as divided as ever. The
provincial government and some tribes have come out in support of Baghdad
against the insurgency, some tribes oppose both the central government and the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), some sheikhs have joined the
revived insurgency, and ISIS is trying to take advantage of the entire situation.
This is just the latest manifestation of the deep schisms that have existed
within Anbar since the 2003 invasion. After the fall of the former regime, the
Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) and the tribes struggled for power. The story of
former Governor Mamoun Sami Rasheed Alwani who was in office from 2005-2009,
and later served on the provincial council from 2011-2012 showed the constant
rivalry between the tribes and IIP for control of Anbar.

Gov Alwani giving a speech in Ramadi 2008 (DIVIDS)

After the American invasion Anbar quickly deteriorated. At
first, there were no real problems, and the U.S. hardly paid attention to the
governorate. By 2004 however it became a center for the insurgency and Al Qaeda
in Iraq (AQI). That was typified by the two battles for Fallujah that occurred
that year. Governor
Alwani blamed a number of factors for this situation. First, AQI had lots
of money, which it used to spread its influence, and buy off tribes. Second,
the U.S. left the borders open, which allowed foreign fighters to flow into the
province. Third, the Americans didn’t understand Anbar, and ended up neglecting
it as a result. Militants filled the resulting vacuum making Anbar a center for
its activities.

Governor Alwani claimed that he attempted to rectify the
situation by bringing together the three major groups in the province, the
local government, the tribes, and the U.S. military. In January 2005 local
elections were held in Iraq. The vast majority of Sunnis boycotted, and there
was only a 2%
voter turnout in Anbar. The Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) won the election, and
Alwani was picked to by the head of the council, and eventually the governor in
May. (1) Since so few people participated in the balloting the government
lacked legitimacy, and people were afraid to work with it due to the
insurgency. The violence eventually led most of the council to move to Baghdad
for protection, so that it was physically removed from the governorate as well.
The tribes in Anbar were not strong either. Many did not want to work with the
government or the Americans, and many of the prominent sheikhs were in Jordan
either to escape the invasion or the insurgency. The majority of tribes would
eventually join the insurgency because they opposed the U.S. and the
empowerment of Shiite and Kurdish parties in Baghdad. Finally there was the
U.S. army and marines that didn’t understand the tribes, and were often more
interested in protecting themselves. Governor Alwani went to the Americans, and
tried to get them to help with governance and mediate between them and some of
the tribes. This had few results as the militants had the upper hand. Not only
that but Alwani was more interested in solidifying the IIP’s control over the
province. It didn’t have the base to accomplish that, and the U.S. failure to secure
the province meant that it couldn’t expand its support either.

When the Anbar Awakening was formed in 2006 Governor Alwani
tried to claim partial responsibility for its success. He said that the
Awakening was the culmination of his plan to bring together the government,
tribes, and Americans. He then pushed for the U.S. to use the tribes to recruit
for the local police. When the majority of the sheikhs decided to turn on the
insurgency they provided many of their fighters for the security forces. That
included the Albu Issa and Albu Alwan in Fallujah, the Jumali, Halabsa, Albu
Aetha, Albu Alwan in Garma, the Albu Alwan, Albu Assaf, Albu Soda, and Albu
Jaber in Ramadi, the Albu Nimr in Hit, the Albu Abed in Baghdadi, the Jahaifa
and Mola in Haditha, and the Albu Mahal in Qaim. Eventually this cooperation
brought security to the province, and Alwani wanted to take credit for that. He
in fact had little to do with the Awakening, and many of its members actively
opposed him and the Islamic Party.

General Tariq Dulaimi the provincial police chief at the
time and Sheikh Ali Hatem Sulaiman of the Awakening for example were both very
critical of Alwani’s tenure. General Dulaimi believed that Alwani was an early
supporter of the insurgency, and saw the Awakening sheikhs as rivals. The
general claimed that Alwani refused to publicly come out against Al Qaeda, and
supported what he called the honorable resistance to the occupation. Later,
when the Awakening was formed, the general said that the governor was jealous, because
it received the support of not only the Americans, but eventually Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki as well. Finally Dulaimi believed that Alwani was more
interested in having the Islamic Party take over the provincial police and
replace him rather than bring in the tribal forces. The dispute between Alwani
and the IIP and the Awakening was actually more heated. The Awakening sheikhs
wanted the Islamic Party to step down so that they could assume power. Some
like Sheikh Ali Hatem Sulaiman even threatened to attack the party if it didn’t
leave office. The U.S. marines worked out a power sharing deal between the two
to head off the conflict. When the next elections rolled around in 2009, some
tribal leaders were still opposed to the IIP, but Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha ended
up making a deal with them, which was the start of the coming apart of the
Awakening. The accounts of General Dulaimi and Sheikh Sulaiman contradict
Governor Alwani’s portrayal of himself as being at the center of the
transformation of Anbar. Instead they have him at least giving verbal support
to the insurgency, and being an opponent to the Awakening, because it
threatened his political power. He would have preferred if he was at the focal
point of the tribes, the government, and the Americans, but the Awakening
sheikhs took that away from him.

After the 2009 elections Alwani left office, but returned
for a short period in 2011. In 2009 there was a new round of balloting in Anbar
and Alwani was voted out. In September 2011 he was elected back into the government
as a council member, only to be kicked
out in May 2012 when he was charged with corruption. IIP and Iraqi National
Movement member Parliamentarian Ahmed Alwani came
to his rescue saying that the Legal Office of parliament stopped the
proceedings against him, and said that he could stay on the council. Baghdad
had no authority over the matter however, and the decision of the council
stood. Members of the council brought up Alwani’s time as governor, and wanted
to investigate his management of the province and his use of funds. That showed
that some still held grudges against the time the IIP ran Anbar.

Governor Alwani and the Islamic Party might have held
official authority over Anbar from 2005-2009, but they had little actual say in
the province. They were elected by only a tiny fraction of the governorate.
Once the insurgency got going, most of its members left Anbar for their own
personal safety. Alwani liked to say that he had a role in turning things
around, and worked with the Americans and tribes, but he actually opposed the
tribal revolt, and many of the sheikhs wanted him and his party out of office. Later,
when the protests started in Anbar in December 2013, the IIP jumped on its
bandwagon, and became one of its main political supporters. Islamic Party
members like MP Alwani emerged as some of the main speakers at the Friday
prayers in Ramadi. Now with the province up in arms, many of the militant
groups have called the IIP sell outs once again putting it on the outside
looking in rather than having the popular standing that it has always sought in
Anbar.

FOOTNOTES

1. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction,
“Quarterly Report to the United States Congress,” 4/30/11

Monday, January 27, 2014

Michael Spagat is a professor of economics at Royal
Holloway, University of London.He has
written extensively upon survey work done in Iraq, specifically on the two Lancet
reports on estimated deaths in Iraq following the 2003 invasion, and two
other studies done on child mortality rates in the country during the 1990s
sanctions period. He’s also studied the Iraq Living Conditions Survey, the Iraq
Family Health Survey, and the 2013 PLOS Medicine Journal Survey on Iraqi
fatalities. Professor Spagat has found anomalies with almost all of these
papers that undermine their findings. Unfortunately, most of his work is only
known in academia. What follows is an interview with Prof. Spagat exploring his
critiques of these famous papers.

1.In October
2013 a new survey was released on estimated deaths in Iraq after 2003, which
was published in the PLOS Medicine Journal. One of the authors, Gilbert Burnham
was also a co-author of the two Lancet reports on Iraqi fatalities.The press reported that the new survey
believed 500,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the war since the U.S. invasion,
but its estimate for violent adult deaths was actually 132,000.The headline estimate was for what they
called “excess deaths” which they view as caused by the war, although many of
these are non-violent.What did you
think of that new paper?

The Hagopian
et al. report (PLOS) did two separate surveys simultaneously. One was a
sibling survey. The other was the more typical household survey. These are two
different methods to cut up the population into mutually exclusive groups that
exhaust the whole. So you either have a bunch of households that, hopefully,
don’t overlap or groups of individuals matched with their siblings. The
traditional household survey, which has pretty much monopolized the media
attention of the study, didn’t give an estimate for violent deaths. The central
violent-death estimate for the sibling survey, 132,000 non-elderly adults, is a
bit below the Iraq Body Count (IBC)
number for civilians plus combatants.(IBC focuses on civilian deaths but they now also publish counts of
combatants killed. The IBC total for the Hagopian et al. period is around
160,000, including children and the elderly.)

To their credit, the PLOS authors do post
their data online, so you can do your own analysis. I’ve taken the
opportunity to investigate the household survey data together with a Royal Holloway
PhD student, Stijn Van Weezel. The data yield an estimate of around 200,000
violent war-related deaths, i.e., about 40,000 higher than the IBC number for
civilians plus combatants (160,000).

Hagopian et al. have stressed what they call “excess deaths”
rather than violent deaths. Excess deaths are meant to be both violent and
non-violent deaths that have been caused by the war. Unfortunately, the
excess-death concept is a pretty squishy one based on a poorly designed counter
factual exercise. The calculation hinges on constructing a death rate that
would have occurred, theoretically, if there had never been a war. This is
something we can never measure directly. We’d like to run history twice, once
as it actually happened with a war, and once without the war. We would then
measure death rates under both scenarios and call the difference between the
two the excess death rate caused by the war. Obviously, we can’t ever do this
exercise or even anything that resembles it.

There are, nevertheless, a couple of approaches that have
been tried with the hope of pinpointing the causal effect of a war on death
rates. The most common one is to measure both a pre-war death rate and a
during-war death rate and to then assume that the difference between the two is
caused by the war and nothing else.

Unfortunately, such a before-and-after exercise is
problematic. It pretty much boils down to saying that because “b” comes after
“a”, then “a” has caused “b.” This is a known logical fallacy. In the case of
Iraq a lot that can affect death rates has happened since March 2003. The start
of the war is the most obvious and dramatic factor but it is only one of these
things. In conflict situations there can be an event like a drought that
directly causes deaths but also exacerbates tensions, leading eventually to
war. If you attribute all increased deaths to just the war then you’re missing
the fact that there was also a drought that was also probably causing deaths. You
wind up exaggerating the number or deaths caused by the war.

In fact, the standard excess-deaths concept leads to an
interesting conundrum when combined with an interesting fact exposed in the
next-to-latest Human
Security Report; in most countries child mortality rates decline during
armed conflict (chapter 6). So if you believe the usual excess-death causality
story then you’re forced to conclude that many conflicts actually save the
lives of many children. Of course, the idea of wars savings lives is pretty
hard to swallow. A much more sensible understanding is that there are a variety
of factors that determine child deaths and that in many cases the factors that
save the lives of children are stronger than the negative effects that conflict
has on child mortality.

Anyway, Hagopian et al. didn’t bother much with the above
reflections but, rather, charged straight in and estimated 400,000 excess
deaths. However, they have quite a crazy confidence interval around this estimate
- 50,000 to 750,000. So even if you accept their notion of excess deaths at
face value you still have to say that this is not a very informative
estimate.

My student Stijn and I are taking a different tack in our
analysis. We say that if the war is causing non-violent death rates to increase
then you would expect non-violent deaths to increase more in the violent parts
of Iraq then they do in the non-violent parts of Iraq. To the contrary, we find
this just isn’t so. At least in our preliminary analysis, there seems to be
very little correlation between violence levels and changes in non-violent
death rates. This should make us wonder whether there is any reality behind the
excess deaths claims that have been based on this Iraq survey. In fact, we should
question the conventional excess-deaths idea in general.

Nevertheless, the authors and the media have stressed this
excess death estimate while obscuring the great uncertainty that surrounds it. Remember,
the estimate is 400,000, give or take 350,000. Yet somehow the authors were
able to talk
that up to 500,000 deaths and assert this number as a sort of minimum. Thus,
the uncertainty was expunged, and then there was inflation from 400,000, for
which there is some supporting data, to 500,000, which is more of a speculation
than a finding. Obviously 500,000 is a media friendly number - people like the
idea of half a million.

Although the household survey of Hagopian et al. tells us
little about excess non-violent deaths it does bring to bear some useful evidence
about violent deaths. The new study suggests that the full number of violent
deaths in the Iraq war is a bit higher than the IBC number (200,000 versus 160,000
civilians and combatants). Much other evidence points in this direction but
such an understanding has not been universal. Strangely, though, Hagopian et
al. seem to believe their findings are at odds with IBC, perhaps because they
are unclear in their minds about the distinction between excess deaths and
violent deaths.

I have looked a little bit at just the time period that
was covered by the Burnham et al. 2006 study that had found 600,000 violent
deaths. The Hagopian et al. data will come in at around 100,000 deaths for that
same time period. So there is a factor-of-six discrepancy between the two. To
say these are consistent with each other is really farfetched.

Comparing the way the Hagopian et al. survey has been
presented, and the way the Roberts
et al. 2004Lancet survey was presented is also interesting. In both
cases you have a central estimate of excess deaths with almost comical uncertainty
surrounding it. For Roberts et al. this was an estimate of 98,000 with a
confidence interval of 8,000 to 194,000. Then there is a public relations
campaign that erases the uncertainty, leaving behind just the central estimate
- 100,000 for Roberts et al. and 400,000 for Hagopian et al. Finally, the
central estimate
is promoted as a sort of minimum, with the “likely” number being even
higher than their central estimate. Actually, Hagopian et al. went one step
further, inflating up by another 100,000 before declaring a minimum of 500,000.

2.When you read
the PLOS report it seemed like they definitely recognized all the criticisms of
the 2006 Lancet paper, because it said they did all these steps to avoid
those problems. Then when they went to the media they said there was no problem
with the Lancet paper at all, and our new report backs it up. It seemed
like what they said to the press, and what they actually wrote were two
different things.

Right, I completely agree with that. Of course, if the
numbers had come out similar between the two survey then they would have, said
“look, Burnham et al. was criticized for all these reasons. We fixed all of
those things, but it didn’t make a difference, so the criticism was not
important.” In fact, what happened was that the Hagopian et al. report fixed
most of those things and then the numbers plummeted. Unfortunately, the authors
don’t yet seem willing to come to terms with this fact in the public dialogue.

3. Let’s turn to the two Lancet reports. One of
your main critiques of the 2006 Lancet report was what you called the “main
street bias.” Could you explain what that was and what you thought were the
major problems with that Lancet paper?

The main street bias critique is that the 06 Lancet
surveyed main thoroughfares where there would be higher likelihood of violence and
thus overestimate for deaths in Iraq (Defence
And Peace Economics)

That was among the critiques, and that was the first one I
made together with some other people. That was just from reading the
description of the sampling method Burnham et al. wrote in the paper. This
originally arose in a discussion that Neil Johnson and I were having with
Burnham mediated by a reporter at Science magazine. He got our input,
and then he forwarded that on to Burnham, and then Burnham made a response that
came back to us….and so on and so forth. We read carefully what the report
said, which was that the people who did the interviews selected a main street
at random from a list of main streets. Then interviewers selected a random
cross street to that main street, and did their interviews along that random cross
street. We argued that such places would tend to be more violent than average,
so sampling using that method would tend to overestimate.

At some point in that discussion (that eventually turned
into an
article for Science magazine) Burnham said they actually didn’t do
what was described in the Lancet paper.He said there was a sentence that had been cut from the paper at the
demands of the editors to save space, although the paper was actually well
below the maximum length for a paper in the Lancet, and there was a lot
of text left in the final paper that was certainly more superfluous than
ensuring an accurate description of their sampling methodology. That last
sentence supposedly said that if there were streets that were not cross streets
to main streets those were included in the procedure as well. I thought it
really made no sense to have such a procedure. You take a main street at
random. Then you choose a cross street to the main street, but if there are
streets that aren’t cross streets to main streets, they also included those in
some unspecified way. Of course, pretty much wherever you go there are going to
be streets that aren’t cross streets to main streets, so why do you even bother
to select a main street and a cross street? Inevitably you’ll just find out
that there are other kinds of streets as well so you’ll then have to figure out
a way to include these too. And how can you operate without a well-defined procedure
for selecting streets? That was the moment I realized that something weird was
going on with this survey. It seemed that Burnham didn’t even know what his
field teams were doing. It also seemed like he was willing to change arguments
on the fly without knowing what he was talking about.

We informed the Lancet that we had been told that
the authors hadn’t followed their published sampling procedures so maybe there
should be a correction, but there was never any correction.

Neil Johnson and some other colleagues still wanted to
pursue the logic of what would be implied if the field teams actually followed
the procedures they claimed to have followed. We
worked this out in more detail and developed a plausible range of assumptions
that suggested that the impact of following main-street-biased procedures could
potentially be quite large. We suggested likely scenarios that could lead to
overestimations by even a factor of three. It seems that in practice Burnham et
al. overestimated by a factor of six or so. Perhaps main-street bias can
explain a good chunk of this overestimation. I don’t think it really has the
potential to explain all of it. At the end of the day I’m not confident that
main-street-bias explains much of anything given that we have a glaring
ambiguity about what actually happened on the ground in this survey. Burnham
says they didn’t actually do what they claimed to have done in the published
paper, but he has never specified a viable alternative. Where does that leave
us in the end?

4.Do you have
any other critiques of the 2006 Lancet?

There are many others. For example, there's a long sad
story having to do with the trend in that survey. If you go back on the Lancet
website there’s a
podcast that was put out right when the Burnham et al. study was published.
Gilbert Burnham was asked by an interviewer how he can be confident in these
phenomenally high numbers that are so far out of line with other sources. His
answer was that he is very confident, because although the numbers are
considerably higher than the Iraq Body Count numbers the trends match IBC’s
trends quite closely. So that was the confirmation - they got the same trends as
IBC.

Then there’s a graph in the paper (figure 4) where they
compare the trends from IBC and their own trends. I never understood that graph
until there were letters in the Lancet about it. One
of the authors was Jon Pederson who was the main person behind the Iraq Living
Conditions survey, and Josh
Dougherty of IBC also had a letter about this. There were many flaws with
the graph, but a crucial one was how they compared the trends. They have three
time periods, each of 13 months. Their own (Burnham et al.) figures are just
what you’d expect – one for the first 13 months, one for the second and one for
the third.But the IBC figures are
cumulative. So the first IBC figure covers a 13-month period just like the comparable
Burnham et al. figure. However, the second IBC figure covers 26 months and is
compared with a 13-month Burnham et al. figure. The third IBC figure covers 39
months and is compared with a 13-month Burnham et al. figure. In short, they
present a graph comparing cumulative figures with non-cumulative figures! And
do you know what? The IBC cumulative figures sky rocket up just like the
non-cumulative Burnham et al. figures. And that’s the confirmation that makes
them so confident in their outlying numbers. However, if you compare like with
like you see that the Burnham et al. numbers rise much faster than IBC’s, and
follow a different pattern.

There was never any follow up to that interview. If you
ever interview Gilbert Burnham you might want to ask him: “now that the basis
for your confidence in your numbers has been exposed as false will you now be
changing your position?”

5.There were
two others surveys, the Iraq Living Conditions Survey and the Iraq Family
Health Survey.They had radically
different findings than the Lancet surveys had. A lot of people compared
those, so what were the differences between those other surveys and the two Lancet
ones?

The Iraq Family Health
Survey (IFHS) covered the same time frame as the 2006 Burnham et al. study.
They published a central estimate of 150,000 violent deaths. That would compare
to the 600,000 in the Burnham et al., so those were apart by a factor of four. That
said, the people who did the IFHS really went into contortions to try to raise
their number up as high as possible, so the real distance is actually greater
than a factor of four.

The main estimate in the IFHS report was calculated in a
different way than is normal. If they had done the usual thing their estimate
would have come out around 100,000 or even 80,000. So they did two things to
push their number upward. One was to adjust for clusters that had been selected
in their randomization procedures, but where they had not been able to complete
their interviews because they considered those places too dangerous to enter at
the time the survey was done. So they applied an adjustment that had the effect
of raising their estimate from about 80,000 up to 100,000. That was not a crazy
thing to do although it was quite a dramatic adjustment. It had the implication
that the clusters in Baghdad where they hadn’t managed to interview were about
four times as violent as the ones where they did. That is a rather bold
assumption to make, but leave that aside.

Next the IFHS did an arbitrary fudge upward of an
additional 50%. They basically just declared without evidence that surveys tend
to under estimate violent deaths. So they raised their number from 100,000 to
150,000 with hardly an attempt at justification.

I would argue that in reality the IFHS found around 80,000
to 100,000 - take your pick.

Even if you accept the fudge up to 150,000 the IFHS is
still completely out of line with the Burnham et al. survey, and not just for
the overall number. For example, the Burnham et al. survey had a few
governorates with incredibly high numbers that aren’t at all supported by other
evidence. Burnham et al. also had a dramatic upward trend that isn’t matched by
the IFHS or IBC or any kind of other measurement that’s been taken there.

The Iraq Living
Conditions Survey really only covered slightly more than the first year of
the war. The first Lancet survey by Roberts et al. covered a bit more,
about the first 18 months, so they’re not exactly comparable. The best way to
think about the first Lancet survey is that it produced virtually no
information. They had an estimate of 98,000 excess deaths with a confidence
interval of 8,000 to 194,000. Right off the bat it’s just kind of useless
because estimates with that kind of uncertainty tell you nothing. They didn’t
actually calculate the confidence interval correctly either. If it is
calculated correctly it comes out even wider than what was published, although
in the end this probably doesn’t even matter.

The Iraq Living Conditions Survey didn’t estimate excess
deaths so it is a little bit hard to compare it with Roberts et al. However,
you can sort of bridge the gap because there was some data released on Roberts
et al., and you can use it to get rid of the deaths after the time period the
Iraq Living Conditions Survey was finished. Then you need to focus just on
violent deaths. Roberts et al. then has about 70% more violent deaths than the
Iraq Living Conditions did. They are not really compatible with one another,
but they’re not wildly out of line either. It’s the Burnham et al. survey that
is seriously at odds with everything else.

I prefer to focus more on violent deaths. Certainly if
you’re trying to compare all of the different sources you have to do this. In
some sense you can say that all the excess deaths estimates are kind of
compatible with one another because the confidence intervals are so wide that
the only reasonable conclusion is that we’ve hardly got any idea about excess
deaths, even if you accept that the whole notion of excess deaths as defined in
this paper makes sense.

6.You also had
problems with how they estimated their excess deaths. You had an article “The Iraq
Sanctions Myth” that was talking about a letter published in the Lancet by
Sarah Zaidi in 1995 that claimed that half a million children, died due to
sanctions.The other was “Sanctions
and Childhood Mortality in Iraq” by Mohamed Ali and Iqbal Shah that was
also in Lancet in 2000. Subsequent work extrapolated from this work and
found 400,000-500,000 excess child deaths in Iraq from 1990-1998. You said that
there were problems with their estimates, so a lot of the subsequent surveys
were using problematic surveys from before to figure out what the death rate
was in Iraq before the war to make their estimate for the excess deaths
afterward as well right?

Comparison of
survey estimates on child mortality in Iraq during and after the sanctions
period (Pacific Standard Magazine)

To answer your last question first, sanctions-era
estimates have not been carried forward to feed into excess death estimates
made during the war. All the estimates discussed earlier in the interview have
used their own surveys to estimate pre-war death rates.

I’m also very critical of the sanctions era estimates of
how many children were supposedly killed due to sanctions. These numbers were
first based on a survey done and later
retracted by Sarah Zaidi. She subcontracted her field work to some
government workers in Iraq and, on the basis of the data they gathered,
estimated half a million excess child deaths. This number was then cited by Leslie Stahl in her famous
interview with Madeleine Albright. Stahl actually won two awards for that
interview including an Emmy, but the basis for it turned out to be a survey
that was later retracted. The story is that some people found anomalies in the
survey. So Zaidi, to her credit, went to Baghdad herself and re-interviewed
many of the same households. She found that a lot of the deaths the Iraqi
surveyors had reported simply weren’t there. The data were just wrong so this
calculation falls even before you question that whole methodology of looking at
pre versus post as I do earlier in this interview.

However, the critique of the excess-deaths concept
certainly does apply to child deaths in Iraq in the 1990’s. It is not convincing
to assume that any differences between pre and post child death rates are due
entirely to sanctions. There was so much going on in Iraq besides just
sanctions. There was the first Gulf War, there were uprisings both in the south
and the north that were suppressed, etc. To the extent that there was an
increase in child death rates there could have been a lot of causes besides
just sanctions. However, in this case you can just leave that whole critique
aside, because the basic measurement was wrong.

Shortly after the Zaidi survey was retracted, UNICEF
did a new survey, again subcontracting the fieldwork to Iraqi government
officials. They found basically the same thing that Zaidi had found initially,
which should have raised red flags straight away. One person goes in and
conducts a survey that pretty clearly was manipulated. I don’t think this was
Zaidi’s fault and I’ve always praised her for correcting the record, which is
rare. However, if the corrected record is true then why is someone else finding
something that would completely contradict this newly corrected record? You
might also ask why, if we already saw Iraqi government workers manipulate one survey,
does UNICEF then create an opportunity for the same thing to happen again? In
this particular case we also need to consider that it was a central policy of
the Iraqi government to convince the outside world to drop sanctions against
it. One of the arguments they were using was that sanctions were hurting Iraqi
civilians, in particular Iraqi children. Why then give that government an
opportunity to do a UN-sponsored survey to reinforce their foreign policy
position? How confident can you be in these results?

So UNICEF got similar results to the ones that Zaidi had
just retracted. And those UNICEF results remained the conventional wisdom for
several years, going right up to the beginning of the 2003 war and beyond. It
was widely believed that sanctions were responsible for the deaths of hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi children, but the problem is that since then there have
been four further surveys that have all failed to find the massive and
sustained spike in the child mortality rate in the 1990’s that Zaidi had found
and lost and that the UNICEF survey had supposedly rediscovered. At this point
there’s so much evidence piled up against the UNICEF survey that I don’t think
a rational individual can believe any more in the sanctions-excess-child-death
story that we were sold before the war. You don’t have to even question the
excess death concept to grasp this point. All you have to do is look at what
all the surveys find. In order to get this massive number of excess deaths you
have to have a huge and sustained spike in the child death rate after the
sanctions come in, and this simply doesn’t happen in any of the surveys since
the UNICEF one from the late '90s.

7.I want to try
to address some of the arguments made by people who defend the two Lancet surveys.Some of the most common ones that I’ve heard
were that it was published in the Lancet that is a respected journal, it
was peer reviewed, and that they did it during a war so you’re never going to
get perfect work during that time.Given
all that people say that others shouldn’t be so critical of the two
surveys.What do you think of that kind
of defense?

First of all, saying that something has to be right or is
probably right because it has been peer reviewed is quite a weak defense. Peer
review is a good thing, and it is a strength of scientific journals that there
is that level of scrutiny, but if you look at the list of scientific claims
that have turned out to be wrong and that have been published in peer reviewed
journals….well…the list just goes on and on and on. Publishing in a peer
reviewed journal is no guarantee that something is right. Some of the people
who do the referee reports are more conscientious than others. In almost no
cases does refereeing ever include an element of replication. Often referees
don’t even know enough about literature cited to judge whether claims about the
current state of knowledge are accurate or otherwise. Mostly people just assume
what they’re being told by the authors of the paper is correct and valid. Peer
review is better than no peer review, but it hardly guarantees that something
is going to be correct.(Let’s not
forget the graph discussed earlier in this interview which survived the Lancet’s
peer review procedures.)

Journal peer review is just the beginning of a long peer
review process. Thinking that journal peer review is the end of this process is
a serious misunderstanding. Peer review is an ongoing thing. It is not something
that ends with publication. Everything in science is potentially up for grabs,
and people are always free to question. Anyone might come up with valid
criticisms.

If you look at Burnham et al. there have been a number of
peer reviewed articles that have critiqued it, and said it is wrong. So if you
think peer review has to always be correct then you’re immediately in a logical
conundrum because you’ve got peer reviewed articles saying opposite things. What
do you do now?

As for the Lancet, as a scientific journal over the
last decade or more it has had quite a spotty record. Much of what it has
published has turned out to be wrong. The Lancet is not considered one
of the more reliable scientific journals and it has a reputation for
sensationalism. You have to remember that at the end of the day the Lancet is
a profit making operation. It is chockablock full of advertising. Library
subscriptions are extremely expensive. It brings in millions of pounds of
revenue. Sensationalism sells, so by some metric Richard Horton has been a
successful journal editor, because he’s gotten a lot of media attention. It’s
good for subscriptions, good for advertising, but articles in the Lancet
still need to be scrutinized on a case-by-case basis, as is the case with any
other journal.

I’m happy to give people credit for doing difficult
research in war zones. And I’m happy to admire the courage of people who do
dangerous field work. But doing courageous field work doesn’t make your
findings correct and we shouldn’t accept false claims just because someone had
the guts to go out in the field and gather data. Science is a ruthless process.
We have to seek the truth. Courage is not an adequate rebuttal to being
wrong.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Sheikh Sabah al-Sattam Fahran al-Shurji Aziz is the primary
sheikh of the Albu Mahal tribe located in western Anbar that stretches into
neighboring Syria. After the 2003 invasion the tribe joined the insurgency to
fight the Americans and was actually allied with Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). In
2005 it decided to turn on the Islamists for a number of reasons making it the
second tribe in the province to do so. Its revolt was short lived, however.
Sheikh Aziz’s story not only highlights the change in Anbar from rebellion against
the U.S., to fighting AQI, but also the beginning of a new Sunni sectarian
identity that emerged after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Sheikh Aziz and his Albu Mahal are based in Qaim along the
Syrian border (Wikipedia)

After the removal of the Baathist regime in 2003, Sheikh
Sabah al-Sattam Fahran al-Shurji Aziz and his Albu Mahal tribe joined the
insurgency. He
believed people had the right to oppose the foreign invader, and so he took
up arms against the Americans. Sheikh Aziz believed that the U.S. came into
Anbar and used the wrong people, and humiliated and scared the locals. More
importantly he felt like the tribes were ignored by the occupying power. This
led the Albu Mahal to join
the fight against the Coalition. Anbar was one of the first areas of Iraq
to rise up against the occupation, and the sheikh gave a good explanation for
why that happened. The province was actually overlooked during the invasion and
U.S. forces didn’t enter until afterward. When they did there were a number of
incidents involving demonstrations and firing into crowds that quickly angered
people and created an impetus for people to become insurgents. There were also
those that had a nationalist reaction to the invasion from the start and wanted
to fight the Americans.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Tawid wal Jihad, which would become
Al Qaeda in Iraq, portrayed itself as defenders of the Iraqis against the
occupation. Aziz said that when AQI came to Anbar it tried to win over the
people. It claimed that it wanted to fight the invaders, and handed out money
to the tribes to gain their loyalty. However in the following years Anbar
turned on the group because it humiliated people, tried to impose their foreign
ideas, and were violent and distrustful of Iraqis. A local police chief from
Qaim who was from the Albu Mahal was assassinated by AQI for example, which
started a blood feud between the two. The Islamists also tried to take over the
tribe’s smuggling business. Many others in Anbar eventually turned on AQI, and
all had the same complaints. Al Qaeda claimed it came to help Iraqis, but it
really wanted to take over. Its heavy handed tactics eventually wore out its
welcome. The sheikh came to believe that Al Qaeda was controlled by Iran, and
was being used by Tehran to destroy Iraq. This was an opinion that became very
popular amongst some Sunnis. Faced with the fall from power after 2003, the
rise of Shiite and Kurdish parties, and the U.S. occupation, many Sunnis were
at a loss to describe the new status quo. Given this new situation many turned
to what they knew which was Iran to explain things claiming that Iran was not
only behind Al Qaeda, but the new ruling parties, and the Americans. Sunnis
came to believe that they were victims of this triumvirate of powers.

In the spring of 2005 the Albu Mahal decided to turn their
guns on Al Qaeda in Qaim. The tribe created the Hamza
Brigade along with the Albu Nimr in Hit. The Brigade had a tough time of
it, because the insurgents outgunned them. Anbar Governor Sheikh Faisal
al-Gaood who was from the Albu Nimr went to the Americans for help, but didn’t
get much. For instance, the U.S. launched Operation Matador in Qaim in May, but
did not include the Hamza Brigade, and actually killed some tribal elements. Nevertheless,
by the summer the Brigade had expelled AQI from Qaim. By the end of August, the
Americans had finally begun
working with the two tribes. That didn’t stop the Islamists from fighting
their way back into Qaim, and almost destroying the Brigade by September.
The Albu Mahla and Albu Nimr were only the second group in Anbar that tried to
fight Al Qaeda. The Americans at the time were still not sure of how to work
with the tribes, and many were more concerned with protecting their own forces
than making allies with Iraqis, especially ones like Aziz’s that had once been
insurgents. The Coalition eventually did start working with the Brigade, but
not enough to allow them to stand up to AQI.

After the tribe’s defeat in Qaim it was able to make a
comeback only to lose out once again. U.S. Special Forces eventually arrived in
western Anbar and organized the Desert Protectors. Most of the recruits for
this new unit came from the Hamza Brigade, and it was used in Operation Steel
Curtain. Together with the Americans, the two tribes were able to retake Qaim. The
U.S. then used the Protectors to recruit Sunnis into the army and police. That
cooperation fell apart when the Coalition told the new members of the security
forces that they would serve throughout Iraq. The tribesmen only wanted to do
their tours in their areas of Anbar. This disagreement eventually led the Albu
Mahal and Albu Nimr to stop working with the U.S. Again the Americans misread
the situation, and failed to effectively use their Iraqi allies. Without the
help of the Americans there was no hope that the tribes could take on the Islamists
themselves. They had already been defeated, and now they were once again. This
was the same fate of several other tribes in Anbar that tried to rise up
against AQI in 2005. It wouldn’t be until 2006 and the Anbar Awakening that
Iraqis in the province were able to muster enough forces to take on the
militants.

After the Awakening and the turning around of Anbar, Sheikh
Aziz was still not happy with the state of affairs within his country. First,
he did not like the Iraqi government. He believed it was full of people who
were either not from Iraq or were not loyal to it. He was mostly talking about
the Shiite parties that took power that he claimed followed Iran. Not only
that, but because they were installed after the U.S. invasion he did not consider
them the legitimate rulers. At the same time, he wanted the Americans to stay
in the country long term to deter Iran and keep the Kurds in line as well. Aziz
was no less forgiving when it came to Iraqi democracy. He said that it would
take ten to twenty years for the public to understand it, and until then the
politicians would manipulate the situation to stay in office. Instead, he
advocated for the Sunnis to resume their natural role in Iraq, and rule the
country in some type of autocracy. Many others in Anbar felt the exact same way
as Aziz. They thought of the Shiite as either Iranians or controlled by them. Likewise,
the Kurds were not Arabs and therefore not really Iraqi. Finally, democracy was
a foreign idea brought by outsiders, which had empowered the Shiite and Kurdish
majority to rule over Sunnis. The end of the civil war in 2008 did not change
those opinions, but rather transferred them from the battlefield to politics.
Many Sunnis feel that attempt failed, and they are taking up the gun once again,
because their new sectarian identity does not allow them to accept the current
situation in the country.

The Albu Mahal tribe went from insurgents to counter
insurgents, but remained opponents of the new Iraq. Sheikh Aziz and his tribe
saw the U.S. invasion as ushering in not only a foreign occupation, but also empowering
Shiites and Kurds, which he never saw as real Iraqis. That was what led the
Albu Mahal to initially join the militants and work with Al Qaeda. AQI turned
out to be a bigger threat, and the tribe was one of the first to try to fight
the Islamists. Despite two tries, it didn’t have the numbers or support to take
on the group. It would not be until the Anbar Awakening in 2006 for the Albu
Mahal to have any success. Afterward Iraqi politics became the main area of
competition, and Aziz was not happy with that either. In the current fighting
in Anbar the Albu Mahal have not been mentioned. That’s probably because it is
off by the Syrian border rather than in the center of the province where the combat
is going on. Still it would not be surprising if Sheikh Aziz and his men rejoin
the insurgency given its views of the country.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Parts of Iraq’s Anbar province are in open rebellion right
now against the central government. One of the main complaints of the Sunni
population who is behind the revolt is the abuses of the Iraqi Security Forces
(ISF). The army and police no longer carry out counterinsurgency operations
where they attempt to protect the population, but rather act like the United
States did before the Surge with indiscriminate shelling of population centers
and mass raids and arrests. Because of these tactics many feel like they are
suffering mass punishments simply because they live in the wrong area and
happen to be Sunni. This is a major reason why some people have decided to take
up weapons against the government once again.

One of the reasons why so many thousands of Anbaris have
fled their homes during the current round of fighting is to escape government
shelling. On January
4, 2014, Reuters reported that the army was shelling parts of Fallujah with
mortars. One local source told the agency that eight had died as a result,
while a medical source claimed the toll was much higher at 30. The next day a
local Iraqi reporter in Fallujah provided the BBC with more
details pointing out that Askari in the east, Shuhada in the west, Jufhifi in
the north, and Nazzal and Andalus in the middle were all being hit by
government shelling. This was leading to hundreds of people leaving their
homes. January
16, the National Iraqi News Agency (NINA) said that dozens more families
departed Fallujah after another round of army shelling of the Golan, Shuhada,
Andalus, and Jumhuriya areas. January
19 NINA reported that the army was hitting Nizzal, Shuhada, Askari, and
Jebel, causing damages to homes, and more displacement, and that was repeated
on January
21. This immediately became an issue with Anbar notables. On January
5 for example, a meeting took place of Fallujah religious leaders and
sheikhs who called for a halt to military operations and the shelling of the
city. Then during Friday prayers in Fallujah on January 17, clerics brought up
the issue demanding that the army withdraw from Anbar, and to stop the
artillery and mortar strikes on homes. While some of this fire might be aimed
at insurgents, too much of it appears to be indiscriminate. This is destroying
and damaging dozens of homes, and causing a huge out migration from the city. It
also doesn’t give the impression that the federal forces care about the local
residents or that they are going after the insurgents. This was exactly what
the U.S. did before the 2007 Surge. In Ret. Lt. Col. Nathan Sassman’s Warrior
King and Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco for example, they talked about how many U.S.
units believed that they had to instill fear in the Iraqis so that they would
not carry out attacks. A common tactic was to reply to mortar or gunfire with heavy artillery.
Then American forces were mostly concerned with protecting themselves, and
believed that an overwhelming response such as using artillery after a security
incident would deter the gunmen, but it never did. The Iraqi government is
repeating the same mistake.

(Getty Images)

Before and during the Anbar fighting the ISF was also
carrying out mass punishments against Sunni neighborhoods. January
11, a parliamentarian from Mutahidun demanded that the prime minister stop
security operations in Abu Ghraib, Latifiya, Radwaniya, Tarmiya, and others
areas of Baghdad where the ISF were limiting the movement of residents. December
12, 2013, another politician called on the government to stop blockading
the Tarmiya area in north Baghdad, claiming that it had been on lockdown for
over a week. In November, militants assassinated the mayor of Fallujah. In
response, the ISF arrested
400 people and held them for over two weeks with no charges according to
their relatives. That same month Human Rights Watch issued a report saying that
the Iraqi forces routinely cordoned off Sunni areas such as during Shiite
pilgrimages. During the first week of Muharram for instance in November, the security
forces raided houses and carried out mass arrests in Dora and Adhamiya in
the capital, as well as Diwaniya in Qadisiyah, Hillah in Babil, and Fallujah
and Hit in Anbar. Sheikhs told Human Rights Watch that this had become the
norm. Whenever there were Shiite religious events the army and police would
arrest people before the ceremony, and then release them afterward. Again, the
ISF may believe that this is the way to impose security, but it only
antagonizes the population. Many come to believe that they are being harassed
and arrested simply because they are Sunni. Not only that but the mass arrests
rarely include people actually involved with the insurgency. Instead it usually
nets not only young men, but the family members of people the government is
looking for who are held as virtual hostages until their relatives turn
themselves in. This is another repetition of the mistakes that the Americans
made from 2003-2006. The U.S. Army and Marines would routinely round up all
fighting aged males. In turn, these men were often radicalized in jail or would
turn against the government and sometimes join the insurgency after they were
released. The same thing is likely happening again today.

The Iraqi army and police had years of training in
counterinsurgency operations from the Americans, but after their departure they
stopped because Premier Nouri al-Maliki did not want to cooperate with the
Sunni community anymore. The result is that the ISF have reverted back to the
routine of the pre-Surge U.S. forces carrying out raids, arrests, and
indiscriminately firing artillery and mortars at populated areas. This use of
group punishment only increases tensions between the populace and the
government. It also provides the perfect environment for the insurgency to
flourish. Not everyone in these areas that feel punished by Baghdad support
militants, but some do, and their numbers appear to be growing. More
importantly others turn a blind eye to their activities denying the ISF of
valuable intelligence that would allow them to carry out more precise
operations and round up the bad guys rather than groups of innocent people. It
is up to the prime minister and his aides to recognize the missteps they are
making, so that they can start to turn around the security situation, which is
deteriorating with each day.

Iraq History Timeline

About Me

Musings On Iraq was started in 2008 to explain the political, economic, security and cultural situation in Iraq via original articles and interviews. I have written for the Jamestown Foundation, Tom Ricks’ Best Defense at Foreign Policy and the Daily Beast, and was responsible for a chapter in the book Volatile Landscape: Iraq And Its Insurgent Movements. My work has been published in Iraq via NRT, AK News, Al-Mada, Sotaliraq, All Iraq News, and Ur News all in Iraq. I was interviewed on BBC Radio 5, Radio Sputnik, CCTV and TRT World News TV, and have appeared in CNN, the Christian Science Monitor, The National, Columbia Journalism Review, Mother Jones, PBS’ Frontline, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Institute for the Study of War, Radio Free Iraq, Rudaw, and others. I have also been cited in Iraq From war To A New Authoritarianism by Toby Dodge, Imagining the Nation Nationalism, Sectarianism and Socio-Political Conflict in Iraq by Harith al-Qarawee, ISIS Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassahn, The Rise of the Islamic State by Patrick Cocburn, and others. If you wish to contact me personally my email is: motown67@aol.com